Tuesday Sep 05, 2006

Just as I thought it was cooling down enough for the dogs to start exercising again it goes and warms up
again! Oh well I can put off getting the kickbike serviced for another couple of weeks.

What we need on the kickbike is a better rear brake, its got a 10 or 12 inch rear wheel and mountain bike v brakes. I find I have to squeeze the brakes really hard and we are getting through brake blocks at an amazing rate - maybe two samoyeds are too much.

Thursday Aug 31, 2006

Took the kids and dogs to Cornwall on holiday this year. We stayed in
the village of newtown-in-St.Martin near Goonhilly, nice little
place but the cars do speed through there especially at night. Lots of
small lanes to walk the dogs and children. Local pub with good beer but
sadly never did any food whilst we were there.

Things we did..
Took the ferry from Falmouth up to the National Trusts Trelissick
Gardens, even got the dogs on the boat..Fal River Links.
Went crabbing on the inner pier at porthleven. I say the inner pier as
we read a warning about freak waves on the outer pier and Looe bar. The
dogs got a bit bored but the kids got 20 crabs each time.
Went to Mylor key crabbing off the quay at the back of the car park,
got loads of large crabs there. The only down side was a mans dog
attacked Finn and then got beaten in front of the children upsetting
the younger one - he should have bought the dog a lead rather than hit
it.
We went to East side of Kennack Sands a few times, slightly ruined by
other people's dogs being off their leads roaming the beach causing our
pair to bark a lot. Oh yes and they hate kites..
We went to Hayle beach but had to leave when a kite flyer decided to
practice on the empty beach right over the dogs.
We went to Chysauster ancient settlement on a wet day.
We went to a dog allowed beach near Church cove a few times as
the sand had some streams that were ideal for damming and the rock
pools were interesting, also a good walk allong the headland to the
Halzephron Inn and back.
Ate lots of pasties and I drank some beer.
Had lunch in the Blue Anchor in in Helston a few times.
Cycled up the 1in 5 from helford village a few times.

Tuesday Mar 14, 2006

At home my wife got fed up with the fan noise from our main home computer ( generic AMD pc running solaris 10) so I had to move the computer. So I acquired some sunray hardware and a couple of ethernet to wireless bridges, installed sunray software 3.1 on the server and
away we went. The DTU screen and keyboard are in the lounge where the adsl line comes in, the server is off in a distant room with only 802.11g between them.

This worked but screen refresh was slooow - video just didn't work, time for a change.
So I bought a couple of ethernet over mains units - 85 Mbits/sec, just plug them in, wait a few seconds and they just worked. The only problem is that the configuration software that you need to change the passwords and set a encryption key is windows only, although the vendor says that the signal doesn't go through the meter I am not convinced ( could someone explain that?)... But now the sunray screen updates really fast so that was a good thing to do.

Wednesday Aug 31, 2005

We are back from our summer holiday. We went camping on the Harlyn
Sands camp site just outside Padstow in Cornwall. If you saw a
family with two white dogs in that area it was us. We saw two
other Samoyeds but they were all single dogs.

The campsite is about 100 metres from the excellent Harlyn Bay
Beach and was generally very good..

Each plot was well marked and quite large, but they mixed mobile
homes/ touring vans with tents so you get a bit of noise from their
televisions at night.

Good shop , open long hours, lots of stock.

Had a dozen showers (2x20p), but long queues as the beach emptied
about 5pm.

Had just TWO sinks for washing up, needed about 5, big
queues all the time. This would put us off going back with a tent.

Had very hard working staff, constantly cleaning up, keeping it
tidy.

Other dog owners did not clean up - sent their kids to walk the
dogs.. There was nowhere to take the dogs on the site so we had a mad
dash
to the exit early in the morning before they burst.

Site has a club, good childrens entertainment, the visiting
entertainers work very hard. But later on the club takes on an air of
"Phoenix Nights" with loud music and drunk people shouting all the
way back to their tents at 12:30 at night - thanks!

The site has a curfew on teenagers at 10:30 pm but I'd also ban
walking around the site with open cans/bottles of alchohol, televisions/music
after
10:30pm, and large groups taking more than two plots as they make a lot
of noise as they sit and chat late into the night.

A new swimming pool complex that you pay extra for, was very
nice, not crowded, clean.

Cycling allong the coast road from Padstow to Newquay takes you up
and down some very steep hills especially the one into Mawgan Porth on
the East side and the dip near St Merryn. The children enjoyed
the Camel Trail from Padstow to Wadebridge, its an eleven mile round
trip on a flat wide trail, my only concern was some adults who sped
allong the trail at high speed even though there are lots of wobbling
children around.

Thursday Jul 07, 2005

The grass in the park is long and full of
deer ticks
I have removed three from Finn's face today, it must be the only place his fur is thin enough for them to find skin. I bought a packs of "tick twister" little plastic hooks with a split in the end like a claw hammer, you get the tick in the split and then rotate the hook around the tick until it releases. A fabulous little device and the packet refers to www.otom.com.

Finn's been to the Vets three times this week. First to have a microchip fitted, second time a few days later to see if was still there as I found it poking out his skin, and the third to have a replacement fitted

It's been a big Samoyed spotting few weeks, we saw two at the Farnham Carnival and on the way into the vets
for the third time we met another..

Tuesday Jun 28, 2005

The weather is hot and the giant african landsnails have been at it again. Just as I am trying to sell them they go and breed again. We started off with two hand sized snails and after the winter we now have one giant one, a dozen 3 inch snails and a dozen 2 inch snails living in two tanks. They are quite interactive but seem to have an aversion to garlic!

Thursday May 05, 2005

I don't think I can be accussed of apathy, I recently came across
this site sled dogs
and I started thinking, the samoyeds love to pull, in fact they can't
help it. So whilst I save up for kickbike
they got to pull me round
Farnham Park on a microscooter this evening. We don't have the proper
X-back harnesses but they do have well padded walking harnesses with a
chest strap so off we went. It took a few hundred yards for them to
work out what to do and then we were off - quite terrifying. The
only problem was the rear brake kept smoking as I tried to curb their
enthusiasm. Now they are asleep.

Saturday Apr 30, 2005

Finn, our youngest samoyed
is huge compared to Cleo. She is nearly 18 months old and weighs about
35 lbs, he is 7 months old and is almost 60 lbs, will he ever stop
growing? The vet has reminded us that puppies of large dogs must have
their exercise limited to avoid joint problems in later life so he is
limited to 30 minute walks.

Finn has had a problem ( I won't go into details but it is at the
end without teeth!) which has been very uncomfortable for him. He
hasn't been able to sleep for a couple of nights which has stopped me
sleeping as well - it's just like having small children all over again.
The vet has cured him with a very unpleasant procedure and some
antibiotics and he is catching up with his sleep.

Sunday Apr 24, 2005

Friday afternoon the samoyeds and I went for 6 mile walk around the
army training ground that runs from Farnborough airfield to Church
Crookam and up to Upper Hale. It has quiet paths through pine trees, a
high escapement edge with a ancient fort that over looks the airfield.
We saw some lizards and adders (in fact Finn walked right over one of
them - I better find out the first aid for a adder bite on a dog, I
don't fancy carrying a 70lb dog 5 miles home.

Saturday we did the same thing but my eldest came with us, it
was a lovely warm day, so warm the dogs swam in a sandy pond on the
edge of the water catchment area and now I have two yellow samoyeds and
a house full of sand!

Sunday the kids came for a walk that we found in a small book of
walks around Farnham. We started from the railway station at Bentley
just off the A31. Six miles later (and one very nice pint of beer) we
got back, hardly any distance on road, lots of paths across fields. Of
course the fences have stiles and all of these did not have dog holes,
so I had to lift both dogs over them..